January 13, 2009

A Body in a Hole

In August 2006, independent journalist Garry Leech was detained by FARC guerrillas and held at gunpoint for eleven hours on a farm in La Macarena National Park in eastern Colombia. This detention frames Leech’s new book Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia. During each passing hour of his detention, Leech reflects back on his first trips to Latin America and his years reporting on the U.S. war on drugs in Colombia. Drawing on unprecedented access to soldiers, guerrillas, paramilitaries, and peasants in conflict zones and cocaine-producing areas, Leech’s documentary memoir is an epic tale of a journalist’s search for meaning in the midst of violence and poverty. In the following excerpt from the book, he recalls a visit to Putumayo in February 2001 to investigate Plan Colombia’s initial aerial fumigations.

* * *

I made my way to the hotel restaurant to rendezvous with Eros Hoagland, a photojournalist I had met in Farclandia a week earlier. We had arranged to meet at the Hotel Chilimaco in Puerto Asís before traveling together to the Guamuez Valley, the principal region targeted by Plan Colombia’s aerial fumigations. Eros, from California, is the son of war photographer John Hoagland, who was killed by the Salvadoran army in 1984 while covering that country’s civil conflict.

The next day, Eros and I set off by car on the ninety-minute drive to the town of La Hormiga. The number of coca fields alongside the road increased dramatically as we got closer to our destination. Most of the coca bushes were covered with green leaves and clearly had not been affected by the fumigations. We also passed numerous burned-out vehicles; they had been set ablaze by FARC guerrillas because their drivers had ignored an armed blockade implemented by the rebels a few months earlier to protest Plan Colombia. Signs of rebel activity were also evident where the oil pipeline that ran parallel to the road had been bombed, blackening the surrounding earth and the dirt road. We were clearly in a conflict zone.

Soon after pulling into La Hormiga, we learned that fifteen peasants had been massacred the previous day in the nearby hamlet of Los Angeles. Eros and I made our way to the local army base to find more information. There we met with Major Silva, the commander of the three hundred soldiers from the 24th Brigade that were stationed in La Hormiga. He said there were reports that fifteen people had been killed in a massacre and another 250 had been displaced.

“Who committed the massacre?” I asked.

“The guerrillas,” he replied without hesitation.

I later came to realize that the Colombian army’s modus operandi was to immediately blame the guerrillas for any killings that occurred in rural regions, unless there was clear evidence to the contrary. In some cases, the army’s rush to judgment proved valid; but in many instances, evidence later emerged implicating the paramilitaries, or sometimes even the military itself, in the atrocity.

Major Silva told us that six of the dead bodies had been taken to the nearby village of El Placer. Eros and I found a taxi driver willing to take us to the village, which was only fifteen minutes away and under the control of the paramilitaries. On the drive to El Placer, we saw our first evidence of the aerial fumigations. Numerous fields along the road were full of dead cornstalks and yucca plants. Directly across the road from one fumigated cornfield were hundreds of green coca bushes, apparently untouched by the spraying.

Just outside El Placer, we stopped at a paramilitary checkpoint. Four partly uniformed, heavily armed men asked for our identification and then wanted to know what we were doing there.

“We heard that some of the bodies from the massacre are at the cemetery, and we would like to see them,” Eros explained.

The paramilitaries allowed us to pass, and we quickly located the cemetery.

It was late in the afternoon when we walked into the cemetery, passing rows of graves until we reached a building. An old man sat in a chair in the middle of the structure; several other people hung around, whispering quietly to each other. None of them appeared to be mourning. The corpses of two men and one woman were lying on the cement floor, waiting to be claimed by loved ones; relatives had already retrieved the other three bodies.

The corpse nearest the front of the building was that of a shirtless, skinny, middle-aged man dressed in baggy beige trousers. He’d been shot in the side of the face. Next to him was the body of a short woman, dressed in a blue T-shirt, with a bullet hole in her cheek. Most disturbing, however, was her rounded belly pushing out against the dirty blue shirt. I turned to one of the women nearby to confirm the obvious.

“Was she pregnant?” I asked.

“Yes,” the woman replied. “Eight months.”

“Do you know her?”

“Not really,” she said. Pointing to the shirtless corpse, she explained, “They are a couple. They are from Ecuador and work as coca pickers. I don’t think they have any family here.”

“What will happen to their bodies if nobody comes to collect them?” I asked.

“They will be buried in the ground at the rear of the cemetery.”

I walked over to the third corpse, that of a large man dressed in a bright orange T-shirt and blue jeans. His hands were tied together at the wrists with a white plastic bag, and his face had been pummeled beyond recognition—caved in by repeated blows from a hammer, a large stone, or some other blunt object. I turned to the old man and asked whether he knew who had committed the massacre. He just shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Who knows?”

“We heard that fifteen people were killed. Where are the other bodies?” I asked.

“They haven’t found them yet,” he replied.

After taking several photos of the bodies, Eros and I made our way back to the car. I had never before seen corpses that were the result of violent deaths. I’d anticipated feeling nauseated, at the very least; but looking at the three bodies in the cemetery, I didn’t feel anything. I felt as if I should have felt something, but I didn’t.

Back in La Hormiga, Eros and I dropped off our gear in our respective rooms and met in the restaurant across the street for dinner. We didn’t talk much as we ate, and while I couldn’t stop visualizing those three dead bodies, I was surprised to find that it didn’t disrupt my appetite.

Later I realized that my emotional reaction, or lack thereof, was related to my father’s death, which had occurred only five weeks earlier. He was sixty-seven years old when he died from a heart attack on Christmas Eve in 2000. I’d stayed with my mother for three weeks after the funeral to offer her support and to help her organize his affairs. During this time I had unknowingly suppressed many emotions related to my father’s death. In fact, I was still in a state of emotional shock when I arrived in Colombia and saw the bodies of the massacre victims.

It wasn’t until I was back home in New York more than a month later that my emotions finally came to the surface. There were days when I would find myself sitting on the couch in my living room, crying. At first I didn’t understand why I was crying; the tears just seemed to come out of nowhere. But then I realized that thoughts of my father would always enter my mind during these emotional outbursts. I was finally grieving the loss of my father. For the first time, the full impact of his death, of the fact that I would never see his face again or hear his voice again, overwhelmed me. Suddenly I was feeling an enormous emptiness, and there was nothing I could do about it but cry.

* * *

[Two days later] I left the hotel alone to conduct some research on the fumigations. As I walked along the street I heard the distinctive sound of helicopters. And then I saw a U.S.-supplied Huey helicopter descending toward the army base a little further along the street. Close behind it came another helicopter, and then another, while a couple more circled overhead.

I made my way to the base and easily gained access, since I had been there two days earlier. General Antonio Ladron de Guevara, the commander of the 24th Brigade, had arrived from the departmental capital, Mocoa, to direct one thousand counterinsurgency troops in an operation to retrieve the remaining bodies from the massacre site in the hamlet of Los Angeles.

I stood next to the tall, slender general and watched wave after wave of helicopters touch down to pick up squads of soldiers in order to transport them to Los Angeles. I asked the general whether I could accompany the troops on one of the helicopters, but he refused, saying that I could fly in with him once the area had been secured. I inquired about the army’s relations with peasants in remote communities like Los Angeles.

“We have a situation where there is much disinformation, making it difficult for us to gain the confidence of the people in these areas,” the general explained.

He went on to describe how the rebels and the peasants are sometimes the same people.

“It is difficult because the guerrillas kill four or five people and then change into civilian clothes and act like they don’t know anything about what happened.”

Growing restless, I sought out Eros, and we found a driver willing to take us to Los Angeles. The road to the hamlet was a narrow dirt road that cut through the rainforest. As we neared the first house in the hamlet, a group of soldiers ordered our driver to stop. We told them that we were journalists wishing to accompany the operation. With surprising ease, we obtained permission to observe the house-to-house search for bodies. The army patrol that we were accompanying was searching for massacre victims in the hamlet, while other soldiers were situated in the rainforest perimeter to defend against a guerrilla ambush.

The homes in Los Angeles were not particularly close together—each was surrounded by land used for grazing animals and cultivating crops—and the hamlet was eerily deserted. Other than our patrol, there were no signs of life inside or outside the simple wooden houses spaced along the dirt road. There weren’t even any animals left in the hamlet. Several houses had “AUC” spray-painted on the walls. It was difficult to imagine that only days earlier there had been more than 250 men, women, and children going about their daily lives there, cultivating their crops and caring for their animals. But now the hamlet was a ghost town.

As we walked along the dirt road, a faint but unpleasant odor began to penetrate my nostrils. I tried to ignore it. We continued moving forward into the breeze that was carrying the increasingly powerful and pungent smell. A group of soldiers was standing off to the left side of the road in front of a small, unpainted wooden house, and one of them told us that a body had been discovered at the side of the structure. As Eros and I made our way around the corner, the stench became almost unbearable. It was by far the foulest and most disturbing odor I have ever experienced—it seemed to penetrate not only my nose, but every inch of my being. I suddenly realized that the oppressive stench was emanating from the decomposing corpse, which had been rotting in the tropical heat for more than three days.

Four soldiers holding bandanas over their noses were standing over the lower half of a body. When I first saw only two legs clad in jeans and sneakers, I thought that the corpse had been cut in half. But as I drew closer, I realized that it had been shoved into a hole in the side of a hill and only the lower half was visible. The body was that of a heavyset man, and the soldiers appeared to be in no hurry to remove it from the hole. Eros and I took several photos before moving upwind to try to escape the stench as best we could.

We returned to the corpse when a red pickup truck carrying four teenage boys arrived on the scene. The army had called them in to retrieve the body and take it to the cemetery in El Placer. After getting out of the truck, the boys covered their faces with their shirts in an attempt to defend themselves from the oppressive stench. Two of them grabbed the legs of the dead body and pulled it out of the hole. The face was one of the most horrific sights I had ever seen, and for a moment I wondered whether I’d be sick. The lips were massively swollen, and the eyes bulged so much that I couldn’t help but wonder what was preventing them from popping out of their sockets—they were reminiscent of the exaggerated features of a ghoulish cartoon figure. The skin on the face, as well as that on the hands and arms, was a sickly white color and hanging loose as though it were two sizes too big. I surmised that the disfigurations resulted from a combination of the water and the heat. It wasn’t immediately apparent how the man had died, and the over-bearing stench kept me from conducting a further inspection of the body. The four boys picked up the corpse, carried it out to the road, and laid it in the bed of the pickup truck.

After the body had been removed from the hamlet, we continued with the patrol. Even though we were now upwind of where the corpse had been found, the smell still lingered in my nostrils. We spent the next hour patrolling with the soldiers but didn’t discover any more bodies. We learned from one soldier that many of the displaced villagers were in El Placer, so we decided to head there to get their story.

After locating our driver, who had been lingering at the rear of the patrol, we made our way to El Placer. We told our driver our objective, and almost immediately after entering the village he pulled over to a group of men in civilian clothes. One of them was carrying an AK-47, and two others had revolvers tucked into their waistbands. They were obviously paramilitaries.

When we asked the men where we could find the peasants who had been displaced from Los Angeles, they had a quick word among themselves, and then the one with the AK-47 jumped into the back of the car with us and directed our driver to a nearby two-story cement building. The paramilitary fighter led Eros and I upstairs to the second floor, where we found more than a dozen people who had set up camp in two rooms. The fighter refused to leave and stood guard over us, or perhaps over the displaced villagers, as we introduced ourselves to them and began asking questions about their ordeal. Most of the villagers remained silent, and the couple of men who were willing to speak did so hesitantly. It quickly became apparent that they were too afraid to provide us with any details of either the massacre or their displacement. After five minutes of futilely attempting to gather information, Eros looked over at me and said, “Let’s get out of here.” With a nod of his head in the direction of the paramilitary fighter, he added, “They’re not going to tell us anything as long as he is here.” We descended the stairs, found our driver, and returned to our hotel in La Hormiga.

The next day we drove back to Puerto Asís. While dining and sleeping that night in the Hotel Chilimaco, far removed from the massacre site, I repeatedly caught whiffs of that foul stench. It would return to haunt me on and off for the next several days. That smell was not the only aspect of the massacre that haunted me; I also could not rid myself of the horrific image of that dead body in the hole. In fact, I still remember it vividly from time to time.

Excerpted from Garry Leech’s new book Beyond Bogotá: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia (Beacon Press, 2009). For more information about the book, visit: www.beyondbogota.com

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